> Well, a lot of what made medicine into a respectable science in the
> sixteenth/seventeenth century was the adoption of latin/greek terms for
> common words. The latin/greek terms themselves were bread and butter words
> in latin and greek, but sounded "learned" in English. There's no difference
> between "hematoma" and "blood clot." You do not treat a hematoma
> differently than you would a blood clot.
>
> But in IT, a "pointer" is a variable whose value is an address, which has
> implications for how you are able to use it. And there's nothing in the
> word "pointer" as a common word that would suggest its specific IT use and
> implications.
>
> Joanna
>
But, I don't think this works either. While all hematomas are blood clots (outside the vessels but within the body), not all blood clots are hematomas since many occur inside blood vessels and some - scabs - occur outside the body (and, I think there are scabby blood clots - say, like the one in my stomach following the polyp that was removed - that aren't hematomas. Along these lines there's nothing in the term blood clot as a common word that would suggest its various more technical manifestations in the body or its indeterminacy w/r/t forms of blood clots.